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Pete McMartin: Down with the rich! And while we’re at it, bike lanes! (with video)

Point Grey Road, home to Vancouver’s swankiest oceanfront mansions, is set to become a residents-only street for the city’s elite under a new plan released Wednesday.
However, some residents living elsewhere in Kitsilano fear the area is being turned into a park for the wealthy, where home values will skyrocket as traffic is forced onto neighbouring streets.

I, as much as the next man, love to see the rich punished.

Income disparity, tax avoidance, their habit of miserly tipping, my limitless resentment of someone better off than me ... I can think of plenty of reasons to hate the rich. Who said: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime”? I would claim that honour, except that would be stealing. And I leave that to the rich.

But it’s never occurred to me to hate the rich because of a plan for a bike lane.

Yet that, in the case of Point Grey Road, is what has transpired. In Vancouver city council’s plans to put in a dedicated bike lane down Point Grey Road, and restrict access to Point Grey Road from Macdonald to Alma, critics — whose arguments are propelled, in part, by class resentment — claim the city will be creating a residential enclave for the wealthy who live along that stretch of Point Grey Road.

To which I would say:

Yes, that is exactly what the city is doing.

To which I would then say:

So what?

The city has created dozens of residential enclaves through road closures all over Vancouver, in rich and middle-class and poor neighbourhoods. The city does this by restricting ingress and egress to these neighbourhoods on arterial streets, just as it is planning to do on Point Grey.

And the city has done this because commuters, many of them coming from outside Vancouver city limits, have used residential streets as commuting routes, streets that were not designed for the volumes of traffic they see now. And that is what has happened on Point Grey Road.

But these critics, aside from taking issue with the nuts and bolts of the plan, seem as equally angry that the plan will benefit the rich. Wrote one emailer on the issue, drawing attention to the seaside mini-parks in the area:

“The current proposals would result in most of those mini-parks becoming the almost exclusive property of the already incredibly wealthy, who apparently want nothing more than to have the portion from Macdonald to Alma almost entirely to themselves — plus a few, very few, cyclists who might wander through its gates.

“Sorry you didn’t catch that point; it would be a pity if it takes another decade or so for you to realize that we are missing a great opportunity to preserve a public amenity from being grabbed by the privileged few. But that is Vancouver these days; money talks and big money talks really loudly.”

Those mini-parks, by the way, will still be accessible to the motorized hoi polloi who can reach them by way of West Fourth. But about that road closure the emailer thought was extraordinary: It’s nothing new.

“This is not an uncommon thing to be done in the city,” said Vision Vancouver councillor Heather Deal. “In the ‘70s, the West End was changed significantly when it was determined people were cutting through it to commute. So Chilco was shut down completely and that had been a very common shortcut for people to take. And it was simply determined that those streets were not intended for commuter traffic; they were intended for local traffic.

“And then we’ve had several examples since then. Seventh Avenue is crossed off to any through traffic — it’s just west of Cambie at Heather Street, and it’s been shut down for several years now. Other examples: Ontario at 29th right by Nat Bailey Stadium. There were a lot of cars using Ontario as a faster route to Main, and Ontario was not designed for that; it was designed as a residential street, and a residential collector, but not as a commuting route. So that’s been shut down to through traffic in one spot. And then in Strathcona, Hawkes Avenue has been shut down for some years to through traffic. So this has been done all over the city.”

The question is, where will the diverted traffic off of Point Grey Road go? It will likely go down Macdonald and then down Fourth Avenue, because traffic, like water, finds the easiest route.

But that is exactly the problem: People drive because it is easy. People drive because they are lazy. And that is the real issue, not bike lanes or the rich.

Why — in a compact city that can offer alternative forms of public transit, transit that is so much more environmentally benign — are so many people still in their cars?

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